Bulgaria /

After years of concerted efforts to bury Bulgaria’s judicial system into the ground and after gradually turning the Supreme Court of Cassation (SCC) into a weapon wielded by the oligarchs, the chairperson of the SCC Lozan Panov has undertaken yet another attack against Bulgaria. The country’s de jure №1 judge is suing it in Strasbourg over a BGN 1,000 fine that he got for infraction of the law and that has been upheld by courts of two instances.

Former Prime Minister Ivan Kostov, widely viewed as the founding father of the Bulgarian oligarchy, has admitted to receiving hefty sums from the now failed CorpBank. The lender was drained financially by one of his protégées – Tsvetan Vassilev, who is currently hiding from the Bulgarian judicial system in Serbia.

An official webpage for the Apostolic Journey to Bulgaria of His Holiness Pope Francis was launched on Friday, the Government Information Service and the head of State's Press Secretariat said. The visit will take place from 5 to 7 May.

Just days ago, we witnessed an unprecedented event in the modern history of Bulgarian democracy. One of the Big Three in the judiciary was conclusively found guilty of wrongdoing – by the same judicial system over whose management he has influence as a chairperson of the Judges’ College of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) at that. Let us remind the facts:

At the end of January 2019 a case was filed with a district Court of New York under the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) by three companies and the Varna lawyer Zahari Tomov against a total of 24 defendants. The dispute is over real estate in the Bulgarian city of Balchik and a project that never got off the ground – Silverbeach.

In 2019, our country will host the most noteworthy media event in the history of Bulgaria - the 6th World Congress of News Agencies. It will be held 12-16 June in Sofia and Plovdiv, as the 2019 European capital of culture, said BTA Director General Maxim Minchev at a closing ceremony of the 14th World Meeting of Bulgarian Media on 28 October in Skopje.

The oligarch Ivo Prokopiev, who amassed a fortune exploiting the mass privatisation under former PM Ivan Kostov, has found himself charged with yet another crime - money laundering. It turns out he defrauded the state via concession fees owed for Kaolin and declared smaller output, profit and taxes than the actual numbers were.

More than 330 human trafficking victims were identified in Bulgaria for the first half of 2018, and most of them were women trafficked for sexual exploitation, National Commission for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings Secretary Kamelia Dimitrova told a news conference in Sofia on 18 October. The event marked EU Anti-Trafficking Day.

The oligarchs Ivo Prokopiev, Tsvetan Vassilev and Ognyan Donev and their creator, political engineer Ivan Kostov, have been using the money stolen from all of us to gain access to foreign media platforms in order to defame Bulgaria and their personal enemies. It is a well-established practice that notched anotehr peak over the past week, when different cogs of the Fake News Factory almost simultaneously published downright slandering articles. The gem in this media onslaught came courtesy of Der Spiegel – one of the oligarchy’s favourite foreign platforms for dissemination of lies.

Ivo Prokopiev, currently indicted in the EVN case, has once again slithered his way into the western media, this time using the widely-respected publication Der Spiegel as platform. In an article immediately reprinted by the Bulgarian section of Deutsche Welle (a long-time playground of scribblers serving the Capital circle's interests - author's note), Prokopiev is cited as a source, discussing the media environment in Bulgaria. Spiegel even clarifies that he is an oligarch but somehow a “good” one, because “many set their hopes on him”.

After years of concerted efforts to bury Bulgaria’s judicial system into the ground and after gradually turning the Supreme Court of Cassation (SCC) into a weapon wielded by the oligarchs, the chairperson of the SCC Lozan Panov has undertaken yet another attack against Bulgaria. The country’s de jure №1 judge is suing it in Strasbourg over a BGN 1,000 fine that he got for infraction of the law and that has been upheld by courts of two instances.

Former Prime Minister Ivan Kostov, widely viewed as the founding father of the Bulgarian oligarchy, has admitted to receiving hefty sums from the now failed CorpBank. The lender was drained financially by one of his protégées – Tsvetan Vassilev, who is currently hiding from the Bulgarian judicial system in Serbia.

An official webpage for the Apostolic Journey to Bulgaria of His Holiness Pope Francis was launched on Friday, the Government Information Service and the head of State's Press Secretariat said. The visit will take place from 5 to 7 May.

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